See also
Wikimedia Commons has media related to 2018 Google walkouts .
The 2018 Google walkouts occurred on November 1, 2018 at approximately 11 am. [1] The walkout had a large number of participants. [1] [2] [3] The employees demanded five concrete changes from the company: an end to forced arbitration; a commitment to end pay inequality; a transparent sexual harassment report; an inclusive process for reporting sexual misconduct; and elevate the Chief of Diversity to answer directly to the CEO and create an Employee Representative. [4] A majority of the known organizers have left the company since the walkout and many continue to voice their concerns. [2] Google agreed to end forced arbitration and create a private report of sexual assault, but has not provided any further details about the other demands. [1] [3]
This walkout was initially intended to be "day without women" and later evolved when a larger number of attendees accumulated. [2] There were seven main organizers that asked for an end to sexual harassment, discrimination, and systematic racism. [5] An organizer, Tanuja Gupta, worked in a group called "Googlers for Ending Force of Arbitration" which aided in the growth of momentum towards the sexual assault issue. [2]
On November 1, 2018, more than 20,000 Google employees engaged in a worldwide [7] [8] walkout to protest the way in which the company handled cases of sexual harassment, and other grievances. [9] [10] [11] [12] [13] The protest came one week after a New York Times report named Andy Rubin as having been paid a $90 million severance package despite being asked to resign due to sexual misconduct allegations, as well as other executives with similar allegations towards them who also received severance packages. [2] [8] The core organizers were Claire Stapleton, Tanuja Gupta, Meredith Whittaker, Celie O'Neil-Hart, Stephanie Parker, Erica Anderson, and Amr Gaber. [14] The walkout was organized in less than three days [15] and lasted for a half hour. [16]
Striking workers used a flyer that read:
Hi. I’m not at my desk because I’m walking out in solidarity with other Googlers and contractors to protest sexual harassment, misconduct, lack of transparency, and a workplace culture that’s not working for everyone. I’ll be back at my desk later. I walked out for real change. [17]
The main demand was the act of transparency from a company, the presence of an employee representative, and the public filings of each sexual assault case. There were many signs held up during the course of the protest. One said "What do I do at Google? I work hard every day so the company can afford $90,000,000 payouts to execs who sexually harass my co-workers", another said "Don't be evil". [1]
The Tech Workers Coalition provided a retaliation hotline during the Google Walkouts for employees who faced retribution for their participation. [23]
Two of the Google Walkouts organizers, Claire Stapleton and Meredith Whittaker, claimed that Google retaliated against them following the Google Walkouts by attempting to force them out or demote them. [24] They organized a sit-in on May 1, 2019, International Workers' Day. [17] By July 2019, four of the seven organizers, including Stapleton and Whittaker, had left the company. [25]
In late 2019, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) opened an investigation into the firing of four Google employees over their efforts to unionize. [26] [27] In late 2020, following the investigation, the NLRB filed a complaint stating that the fired workers were not responsible for any wrongdoing and accusing Google of "terminations and intimidation in order to quell workplace activism". [28] [29] It also accused Google of unlawful surveillance for accessing the employees' calendars and other internal documents. [28] The administrative hearing for the case is scheduled for April 12, 2021. [29]
In late 2019, the New York Times reported that Google had hired IRI Consulting, a company that provides anti-unionization services. [30] [31]
Some of the demands made were met or partly met. Many of Google's responses included the reiteration of commitment to past diversity objectives and the improvement of the process to report harassment. The two resolutions that came closest to the employees' demands were the publishing of sexual assault cases, although the company opted for a private, internal report rather than a public one, and increased transparency of sexual assault. [3] In February 2019 Google announced the end of forced arbitration for employees for all claims. [2]
Criticism of Google includes concern for tax avoidance, misuse and manipulation of search results, its use of others' intellectual property, concerns that its compilation of data may violate people's privacy and collaboration with the US military on Google Earth to spy on users, censorship of search results and content, and the energy consumption of its servers as well as concerns over traditional business issues such as monopoly, restraint of trade, antitrust, patent infringement, indexing and presenting false information and propaganda in search results, and being an "Ideological Echo Chamber".
Andrew E. Rubin is an American computer programmer, entrepreneur, and venture capitalist. Rubin founded Android Inc. in 2003, which was acquired by Google in 2005; Rubin served as a Google vice president for 9 years and led Google's efforts in creating and promoting the Android operating system for mobile phones and other devices during most of his tenure. Rubin left Google in 2014 after allegations of sexual misconduct, although it was presented as a voluntary departure rather than a dismissal at first. Rubin then served as co-founder and CEO of venture capital firm Playground Global from 2015–2019. Rubin also helped found Essential Products in 2015, a mobile phone start-up that closed in 2020 without finding a buyer.
#MeToo is a social movement and awareness campaign against sexual abuse, sexual harassment, and rape culture, in which people publicize their experiences of sexual abuse or sexual harassment. The phrase "Me Too" was initially used in this context on social media in 2006, on Myspace, by sexual assault survivor and activist Tarana Burke. The hashtag #MeToo was used starting in 2017 as a way to draw attention to the magnitude of the problem.
Meredith Whittaker is the president of the Signal Foundation and serves on their board of directors. She was formerly the Minderoo Research Professor at New York University (NYU), and the co-founder and faculty director of the AI Now Institute. She also served as a senior advisor on AI to Chair Lina Khan at the Federal Trade Commission. Whittaker was employed at Google for 13 years, where she founded Google's Open Research group and co-founded the M-Lab. In 2018, she was a core organizer of the Google Walkouts and resigned from the company in July 2019.
The Harvard Graduate Students Union (HGSU), officially known as Harvard Graduate Students Union United Auto Workers (HGSU-UAW), is a labor union representing graduate students, teaching assistants, and other student employees at Harvard University. The bargaining unit comprises about 5,000 student employees, including graduate students working as research assistants and teaching fellows as well as several hundred undergraduate students holding teaching positions. Contract negotiations with the university are scheduled to begin in Fall 2018. HGSU is affiliated with the United Auto Workers labor union, whose 400,000 members include 45,000 graduate students and 30,000 academic workers.
Timnit Gebru is an Eritrean Ethiopian-born computer scientist who works in the fields of artificial intelligence (AI), algorithmic bias and data mining. She is an advocate for diversity in technology and co-founder of Black in AI, a community of Black researchers working in AI. She is the founder of the Distributed Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (DAIR).
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Tensions between the multinational technology company Google and its workers escalated in 2018 and 2019 as staff protested company decisions on a censored search engine for China, a military drone artificial intelligence, and internal sexual harassment.
Claire Stapleton is an American writer and marketer known for her involvement in the 2018 Google Walkout for Real Change. She is the author of the newsletter Tech Support.
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Alphabet Workers Union (AWU), also informally referred to as the Google Union, is an American trade union of workers employed at Alphabet Inc., Google's parent company, with a membership of over 800, in a company with 130,000 employees, not including temps, contractors, and vendors in the United States. It was announced on January 4, 2021 with an initial membership of over 400, after over a year of secret organizing, and the union includes all types of workers at Alphabet, including full-time, temporary, vendors and contractors of all job types.
The #MeToo movement emerged in China shortly after it originated in the United States. In mainland China, online MeToo posts were slowed by government censorship. On Weibo, #Metoo and #MetooinChina were both blocked for a period of time. To avoid the censorship, Chinese women using the #MeToo hashtag on social media began using bunny and bowl-of-rice emojis; "rice bunny" is pronounced mi-tu in Chinese. Feminist activist Xiao Qiqi originated the use of rice-bunny emojis for the movement. Another alternative is “River Crab” which indicates censorship. Generally, the #Metoo movement was only accessible to elite women and urban women.
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